Pete Docter’s movies have relied so much on his family that it would not be a surprise if his kids started to demand residuals instead of an allowance.

“They have food on the table. That’s enough,” says Docter, the Bloomington native who won an Oscar for directing “Up” and whose other films include “Monsters Inc.” and the new “Inside Out.”

“Inside Out” opens Friday, and it was inspired by Docter’s questions about what was happening in his daughter, Elie’s, head, when she started to become more withdrawn around the time she turned 11. She’s now 16.

The latest from Pixar Animation, “Inside Out” is largely set in the head of Riley, whose family moves from Minnesota to San Francisco, setting off a bunch of confused feelings that put her childhood joy on the back burner.

The movie’s main characters are her emotions, which spend the movie trying to get in balance: Joy (voiced by Amy Poehler), Sadness (Phyllis Smith, from “The Office”), Disgust (Mindy Kaling), Fear (Bill Hader) and Anger (Lewis Black).

“A lot of what people might think was pulled directly from Elie is not,” Docter says. “It’s basically just the idea of growing up and the movie is really told from a parent’s perspective, with Joy as a kind of surrogate parent: the idea of watching your kids grow up and hoping they won’t.”

That exact sentiment appears at the end of “Inside Out.” “This film is dedicated to our kids. Please don’t grow up. Ever.”

CHILDHOOD MEMORIES

It’s an idea that springs not just from Docter observing his kids (his son, Nicholas, is 18) but also memories of his own childhood, which hit a difficult patch when he was in fifth grade and his family relocated to Denmark for 15 months while his father, David, worked on his doctorate.

“That’s a time when you’re suddenly aware of being judged and of social cues. When you’re younger, there’s no pressure on you, or at least that’s how I remember it,” says Docter, who was a shy kid.

“But I was out of step in Denmark, literally not understanding what anyone was saying to me for several weeks and then, coming back home, I was out of step again because sixth grade is the time when kids start to really grow up — and then you’re in junior high, and it’s hell,” he says.

Docter remains deeply connected to his childhood, which worries him a bit when he thinks about his own kids.

“They come in to Pixar, and everyone is eating cereal for lunch and riding scooters all over the place, and I wonder if that’s how they think all jobs are going to be.”

But that rootedness has come in very handy, career-wise.

His first of six Oscar nominations was for co-writing the “Toy Story” screenplay, partly inspired by his wish that the GI Joes he played with when he was growing up in Bloomington would come alive.

“Monsters, Inc.” (in which both of his kids’ birthdates are plot points) was about the creature he was sure lived in his childhood bedroom closet.

“Up” (in which Elie supplies the name and voice of a key character) took inspiration from a balloon young Docter briefly held onto and then, accidentally, let go.

And “Inside Out” finds Docter connecting with both the kid and the dad in him.

“I wasn’t gunning for the role, but we record scratch (temporary) dialogue as we’re making the movie, and I did the dad character’s Anger voice,” Docter says. “We hired someone else for the part, but when we showed John (Lasseter, Pixar founder), he said, ‘Who was that other voice you used to have? I liked him,’ and I said, ‘That was me.’ ”

EMOTIONAL TRUTH

Re-casting the dad role wasn’t the only U-turn “Inside Out” took. Like most Pixar movies, it hit a wall at one point when it became clear the creators were heading in the wrong direction. One reason the quality of Pixar movies has been so consistent is the company’s willingness to scrap work and start over.

“We were about three years in and, up to that point, we had paired Joy with Fear, only to realize, pretty late, that Fear didn’t really have anything to do with what Joy needed to learn,” Docter says. “The individual scenes were entertaining but, ultimately, they didn’t teach Joy anything and there was no emotional punchline at the end of the movie. So we went back and re-tooled the whole film, with Sadness (in a bigger role).”

Having been through that back-to-the-drawingboard moment on virtually every film, Docter is used to it. But that doesn’t mean he likes it.

“You’re still like, ‘Oh, crap.’ Because you never know if the new answer is really the right answer, either, or if it’s somehow tricking you. I mean, you thought the other thing was the right answer, too, and now here you are again,” Docter says.

The “Inside Out” filmmakers consulted with psychologists to make sure they captured emotional truth in the film — for instance, on the importance that sadness plays in all of our lives.

“In particular, Dacher Keltner, who’s a professor at the University of Cal-Berkeley, had a real fondness for Sadness,” Docter says. “He would always defend it and talk about its benefits: slowing you down when your emotions are moving too fast, helping you heal, asking for help when you need it.”

That last benefit of sadness figures into a key emotional moment in “Inside Out.” For most of the film, Riley’s parents have been confused about their daughter’s sudden unhappiness and she has been afraid to open up to them. That changes when her Sadness finally gets her Joy to stop long enough to consider how hard the move has been on Riley.

“The difficult thing for us was figuring out how Joy and Sadness related,” says Docter, who is satisfied they nailed it in that scene. “Just the specifics of building that scene were hard because we knew Riley had to cry and to admit to her parents that she feels all this sadness and loss. That took some doing but it was always clear to us, conceptually.”

In the end, Docter said the finished “Inside Out” is closer to his original conception than any of the films he has worked on for Pixar — and he got there with a little uncredited help from his parents, Rita and David Docter, who traveled to California earlier this week to attend the film’s premiere and visit with their grandchildren.

“When I’m making a movie, I always conjure my mom as a good benchmark. At Pixar, we work in so much detail that if you stare at a piece of paper, you start to focus on the one little tiny spot that nobody else would notice: ‘Can I just scratch that off? Why is it there? Let’s have a meeting about it!’ ” jokes Docter, who likes to keep his mother’s voice in his head for just such occasions. “It always helps to think, ‘But would my mom even notice that? Probably not.’ ”

So far, the Rita Docter test has served the movie well; it premiered to a standing ovation at the Cannes Film Festival last month. And, if you’re keeping track, that means there are officially three generations of Docters who can claim a little credit for “Inside Out.”

Chris Hewitt was the Pioneer Press movie critic and then an arts and entertainment reporter from 1993 to 2017.

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